Viper Wine (18 page)

‘The
Sidereus Nuncius
is to be tried for promoting his heliocentric heresy,’ said Sir Kenelm. They always called Galileo
Sidereus Nuncius
, the Starry Messenger.

‘So he says it is a mathematical fiction,’ said Van Dyck, ‘and continues to refer to it as frequently as he likes.’

‘Ha! Very good,’ said Sir Kenelm. ‘But for how long?’

They sat outside talking thus for some three hours, surrounded by eavesdropping English daisies, sitting first in tree-shadow, then half-sunlight, then full glorious sun – until the dogs and calls from within alerted them that Master Van Dyck’s guest had arrived.

He was travelling by sedan chair, but he was so tall that the top of the chair had been extended, and the seat removed. Had the gout led him to ride standing? He was haughty, or afraid of the unwholesome London air, perhaps, because he hung a cope of red velvet over the front of his carriage, so as to travel unseen. His two chairmen were also liveried in red. So who is this fellow, wondered Kenelm, who knows so much of the sun?

‘He has come from the New World,’ said Van Dyck. ‘I hope he has not been too much fatigued by his journey.’

Venetia and her boys ran downstairs to watch as the mysterious visitor was helped out of his chair with great care. Finally his footman drew aside his covering. He stood inside a wide terracotta pot, and his body was long and furred with pale sticklehairs, and his face was wide and staring, framed with over-wrought green tendrils and shouty yellow petals.

‘Madam, I present,’ said Van Dyck to Venetia, ‘the Peruvian Chrysanthemum.’ The family clapped and cooed, and Mistress Elizabeth ran to fetch water. ‘Also known as an Indian Marigold or
tourne-soleil.
It is also called, but rarely, heliotrope or sun’s flower.’

It was clear by the way that Van Dyck looked tenderly at the whiskered sunflower that he adored it, although to Venetia its blank face, broad as a bedpan, looked brash and vainglorious. Its size was gigantique, almost frightening. She thought it did not appear to be a very intelligent flower. There was plenty of vegetable in its countenance, she thought, although it had novelty on its side.

‘Heliotrope,’ she said. ‘Might do well as a name for a daughter, if she were plain.’

‘Now, sir, well, sir, what of that?’ marvelled Kenelm. He had never seen a sunflower before, except in sketches.

‘It is a gift for you, madam, in honour of your husband – a plant which, like him, turns to the sun to receive Enlightenment, being mightily Sympatheticall in its nature.’

Kenelm was deeply moved by this presentation. Being the keeper of the Powder of Sympathy in England was a thankless task, and there was too much naysaying and calumny around. Van Dyck was good at presents. He used them as substitutes for his presence, for he never stayed long in one place or country. ‘I hope it will flourish in your garden of daisies, madam,’ said Van Dyck, bowing.

Analogies chimed like angelic bells in Sir Kenelm’s mind. ‘Nature is so infinitely rhyming,’ he muttered. ‘It is as if one link in the chain carries within it a suggestion of the next, as one rhyme leads the way to what the next must be.’ The sunlight seemed to stream down on Kenelm like a golden chain, which twisted before his eyes into a double-helix. He saw the chain of Hermetic knowledge extending backwards to Zosimus, and forward, oh, to Crick and Watson, and onwards to men who made homes out of sunlight, harnessing its power to their purpose. Beside him the sunflower swivelled its alien head to receive the signal of the sun.

‘Shall we sit, my love?’ Venetia was holding Kenelm by the hand, leading him down the corridor to the dining room, where the table was set with game and soppits. ‘He is overcome by your most kind present,’ she said over her shoulder to Van Dyck, in a smile-warmed voice.

‘He was nicknamed “
il fiorito
” in Siena,’ Van Dyck said to Venetia.

‘Because of the fleur-de-lis on our coat of arms?’

‘And because he wilted in the sun, or turned a rosy pink.’

‘And furthermore because I was tall, and said to be the flower of English manhood,’ retorted Kenelm.

‘Who called you that?’

‘Marie de’ Medici!’ And the men laughed and while Venetia was out of the room seeing to some complaint of the boys’, they repeated the old story of how the Dowager Empress had fallen in love with Sir Kenelm, even though he was twenty-six years her junior.

‘She wanted me for her pet, and made much of me, and had me sit with her in her private garden, and bade me sing to her, and then when she heard me singing, bade me recite verse instead.’

Van Dyck put down his mug in expectation of laughter.

‘The ageing coquette! She was very taken with you.’

‘There was no taking of me, I can assure you.’

‘She had that slavering expression whenever she saw you.’

‘And her chins wobbled with desire.’

‘And her eyes crossed through passion. And she applied more and more paint to her face the deeper in love with you she fell.’

‘And her voice was very shrill when she called to me, “
mon petit gentilhomme anglais!
” ’

‘
Mon concombre!
’

‘
Mon petit pain!
’

‘She sent me a map purporting to lead me to a great library,’ said Kenelm, ‘wherein she said I might read the book of all creation. I followed and it led me only to her silken bedchamber, where she patted the pillow next to her, as if to say, Come!’

Venetia returned to the dining room, and the gentlemen changed the tenor of their conversation.

‘Now she is mother-in-law to your King,’ observed Van Dyck.

‘But ah, I am glad I did not have to paint her likeness twenty-one times for the Louvre.’

‘Marie de’ Medici, twenty-one times! That would have been a terrible misfortune!’

‘Truly, terrible.’

‘Worse than anything.’

They all knew that the commission, which had gone to Rubens, would have been the making of Van Dyck, and that he would have done it gladly.

Van Dyck, meanwhile, was looking at Venetia, anatomising her face. Venetia stared back at him, although her tender self shrivelled within her. She hoped his painter’s eye was kinder at least than William Peake’s, that poor artist whom she had so abruptly sent away. She wondered if he could tell that she was three years older than Kenelm, or if he already knew that. She wondered if his heart sank as he thought: Here is another former beauty I must flatter.

In fact, he was thinking: Umber, mink and charcoal for the hair; orpiment, very watery; bismuth white, perhaps, and lead for reflexion, lead-vole for the eyebrows, chalk-lead and ground seed pearl for the skin . . . He could not stop himself. It was how his mind worked when he saw a noblewoman’s face. He liked the plumpness to her chin, her indolent, almost sickly pallor. The hint of tiredness in her eyes was wonderfully worldly.

‘I would so much rather paint your likeness than any Medicis,’ he said. ‘I hope I will have the pleasure.’

Indeed he would. Sir Kenelm cared not for money, and in consequence he had already disbursed two fortunes. Now as a token of gratitude for his privateering, the King had granted him a third: a monopoly on sealing wax in Wales and the Welsh borders. Anyone wishing to write a personal letter, or sign a document, or seal a contract, needed a melting pool of wax to put their seal upon, and for every stick of sealing wax sold, Sir Kenelm collected a penny piece.

Van Dyck was not convinced this was worthy of Sir Kenelm.

‘Can many read in Wales – or write?’ he asked. Van Dyck had not ventured further than London.

‘Ha!’ laughed Venetia.

‘Indeed some can, and more are learning all the time. You remind me of the Earl of Strafford.’

‘Ah, yes . . .’

‘Who on being given the monopoly on soap by the King, said he feared the kingdom is not given so much to cleanliness as to raise this to a high consideration. No, come: this is why my monopoly is so fortunate. It is a trade that can only increase. The demand for sealing wax has doubled in a generation. I durst say in three, four hundred years, sealing wax will be carried by every man in the land.’

Digby was invariably wrong about business matters. He was unusual because many of his judgements were mistaken, yet many others were right, so his insight and blindness flourished side-by-side, and were even part of the same plant, like a flower putting forth a dark and a white bloom on the same stem. Most people develop a habit of being right or wrong, and stick to it, but Digby’s character was to be everything, at once.

‘So we will indeed sit for you, Antoon.’

‘Anthony. I shall be English in England, I hope.’

There were a handful of skilled Dutch painters already in London, and Van Dyck did not wish to become another of them, an exile. He wanted to be at home amongst the English cavaliers, to become the King’s own painter-in-ordinary. He did not know he would become ill in England, spleen-aching at Blackfriars, his golden chain broken for the King’s war chest, his funeral rites read the same day as his baby daughter’s baptism.

‘Once you are finished with the King’s portrait, we shall be next to call on you at your studio. Blackfriars, by the river, no? I have in mind the idea that we should sit for you in a family grouping very like the King’s,’ said Kenelm. ‘True likenesses, very
au courant
, but composed just so, in harmonious alignment, with my zodiacal armillary sphere sitting beside us, to indicate the assent of the heavens. We shall form a tableau of living beings. As if you might see, if you but peeped a little closer, the blue blood under our skin, the pulse of it at our temples, the rise and fall of our chests. To be painted by my friend with my love and our sons, during England’s not unhappy years of peace. I think that will be the very pinnacle of my life!’

Venetia laughed at Kenelm, and kissed his hand, and Van Dyck felt their happiness enclose him also, so they made a sufficient little trio. He was glad to be in London, out of the long war that raged through Hungary, Saxony, Bohemia, Prussia, the Palatinate . . . It was hard for him to know which court to attend next.

‘The Thirty Years War,’ Kenelm called it, which made them all look at him askance.

‘If you say it will last so long . . .’ said Van Dyck, shrugging.

The three of them made a merry dinner, although the elegant tiredness never left Venetia’s eyes, as Van Dyck noticed. She was remote, preoccupied.

Once she had been a pert young miniature, painted by Peter Oliver on the back of a playing card. Van Dyck saw Digby’s copy years ago, in Italy. There was no modesty in her gaze. Shamelessly she challenged you to breathe upon her, take her in your hand and lift her close to your face. He disparaged the copyist’s technique – it was apparent here, and here, that the painter had dragged the stoat’s tooth through the paint to make her hair – but there were magnets in her eyes. No wonder the Lords had all sought to pop her in their pocket.

Now, she would make a full-grown, stately portrait, large as life-size – and never looking at the painter, or the reader of the painting, but always obliquely past, beyond, her mind on higher matters.

Venetia knew she came across as grand, but in truth she avoided Van Dyck’s eye because to look at him was to be seen by him, and she was too tired for that.

That evening, Kenelm felt his cheek aflame and realised he had caught the sun during their three hours’ conference outside. It was never any nobleman’s habit to wear his cheeks ruddied, and yet he felt this was a good omen: the sun-planet was fitting him for worldly power and advancement. Pray Lord its rays might advance his suit for naval comptroller, and bless his conception of their family portrait. It was, indeed, a Sun-day, and he had been wearing yellow, and his golden signet ring: these were all conditions favourable to the sun, and in return the sun had coloured and blessed him, and left its ambitious heat tingling within him. Nothing could begin without the sun’s ignition – not a fire, not a burning glass, not a man’s career. Just as an ear of corn was ripened by the sun, so man was brought to full advancement by sun-bathing, till he shone with burnished glamour. In time, everyone would know this.

The Queen’s private chambers were all a-brabbling confusion of floating featherdown, clouds of new white wool and bits of paper scrunched and cherry-blossoms made of silk. White streamers hung from the rafters, and the floor was covered with white cloth, pale straw, clary flowers and young maidens, tumbling about. That morning, the room had been dressed to resemble a sweet white fairy bower. A tray of milk cakes had been knocked over and a few squashed. One or two girls were singing, out-of-tune, and thumping a stringed pandora, while another poured a fat white rabbit into her friend’s lap.

Outside in the corridor, Venetia could hear laughter and noise. Why was she so often in corridors now, looking in? She used to be always in the midst of things. Today at the Queen’s morning prayers, she had mentioned to Olive that she would come and find her before she left the palace of Westminster, but it now seemed evident Olive was busy playing with the younger ladies at court. Henrietta-Maria was at the Star Chamber with the King, but here her ladies were disporting themselves. Venetia considered going home and leaving the new clique to their play, since they seemed so happy without her, but a deep, social homing instinct pressed her on.